blog: large folder speed

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found here
http://zabkat.com/blog/folder-reading-speed.htm

[pschroeter]

Here’s something I don’t understand. I spend most of my time in the Documents folder and if I have Details view and Calculate folder size on I guess it’s reasonable to expect a short lag the first time I open it. What I don’t understand is why if I navigate into a subfolder, and I then navigate back to Documents why that lag still exists, even though I haven’t made any changes. I am surprised most of these folder size calculations aren’t happening in the background.

I will say earlier this month I switched from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive and my situation has vastly improved. I now actually leave calculate folder size on most of the time. I’ve been obsessed with getting a speedy folder size column in Windows for decades because the Apple Macintosh computer I had 25 years ago with System 7.6 did it rather nicely and Windows still seems to have problems doing it. I also very fondly remember you could customize any icon in the Finder by just opening up the file’s properties dialog and paste a new image into the icon box.

[nikos]

xplorer2 folder size isn't cached, so every time it's calculated afresh. If you want something smarter see this shell extension
www.zabkat.com/blog/23Aug09-folder-size.htm

[Manyx]

"The only consolation is that folders containining under 10000 files are not really affected."
In details mode: the icons are sometimes very long to appears (between 1 and 2 seconds), in folders with a few folders and a few files, and 5 seconds for 36 files.PDF

[nikos]

the icons appear lazily, you don't have to wait to see the icons before starting to use the folder

[Manyx]

Sometimes it is very long, about 20 or 30 seconds (about once a week), like a freeze. And during this time, the preview don't work.

[johngalt]

Are you using HDDs or SSDs (or a combination of both)?

[Manyx]

SSD for Windows and classical hard drive for the personnals datas

[johngalt]

SSD for Windows and classical hard drive for the personnals datas

Windows has a few features to help limit power consumption and these are enabled by default, but you can edit them to your liking at any time. Doing so may alleviate the massive wait time you sometimes experience, but:

I would recommend doing the following ONLY on a desktop machine / a machine that is ALWAYS connected to AC power, not running off battery, as it WILL INCREASE POWER CONSUMPTION (and therefore DECREASE your battery run time).

When I used to run a similar configuration as you for my desktop PC (SSD boot and Mechanical HDDs for storage), which I didn't care about power consumption on (because it was not running from battery), I made sure the in the power profile that I selected (usually Performance or Ultimate Performance), that I set the HDDs to never be powered off, so they are always accessible to me (meaning there is never a time to wait for the mechanical HDDs to spin up before they are accessible).

In Windows 10, go to Windows Settings --> System --> Power & sleep (in left side navigation menu) --> Additional power settings at right (maximize window if you don't see it at the right) - this opens the Control Panel's Power Options. (You can also get to it directly from Control Panel --> Power Options (if your control panel is in icon view) or Control Panel --> Hardware and Sound --> Power Options (if your control panel is in category view).

Once there, you should see at least 1 power profile that is selected, and you may see more that are available - at the right of each of those power plans is a link to Change plan settings - click on the one for the active power plan (or, if you want to change to a different plan, click on the link to the right of the plan you will select as active). Now, at Edit Plan Settings window, click the link Change advanced power settings. The new window that pops up is named Power Options, and the first setting is for Hard Disk, sub heading Turn off hard disk after and subheading underneath that of Setting (Minutes) - The lower the number, the sooner the HDDs turn off. But, if you set it to 0, then they NEVER turn off.

Again, I cannot stress this enough - if your device makes use of a battery, and you use it on battery power a lot, changing this setting will potentially increase the battery consumption and therefore decrease the running time of the battery, because more power is being consumed. So, do this at your own risk.

[Manyx]

Do you think it is the problem?
Thank you for this very clear explanation. There are 2 settings: on battery and on AC power. I've set to "zero" on AC power, I will see

[johngalt]

It is either this, or that your AntiVirus program has started scanning files in the background and takes a few moments to stop scanning so the files are once again available to X².

There are, of course, *other* possibilities, but these are the two most common.